Sleepy Hollow: "Pilot" Review

Insert headless pun here.

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September 14, 2013

ABC found fantasy genre success with Once Upon a Time, NBC with Grimm, and now Fox hopes to join them with Sleepy Hollow. The pilot episode, written by Alex Kurtzman & Roberto Orci (best known for their collaborations with J.J. Abrams, including co-creating Fringe) and Phillip Iscove and directed by Len Wiseman (Underworld) moves quickly to set up what looks to be an enjoyable mix of action and horror with a healthy dose of humor.

Dropping us right into the midst of a ferocious Revolutionary War battle in 1781, Ichabod Crane, played by Tom Mison, comes face-to-face with a gigantic masked horseman and shoots him down. In case there was any doubt that this will not be a historical drama, the horseman promptly rises back up like Jason Voorhees and relentlessly keeps coming until Ichabod manages to behead him, but not before being (mortally?) wounded himself. He wakes up to find himself wandering about in 2013 and the show is off and running.

Meanwhile local cop Abbie Mills (Nicole Beharie) is introduced as she’s a week away from transferring out of town to train in Quantico, but it’s an open question as to whether she’s moving onward and upward or simply running away from her past. The village of Sleepy Hollow does seem to have a tantalizingly mysterious history, and a new rash of beheadings soon has Abbie and the rest of police force scrambling. Before long, Ichabod and Abbie find themselves facing a more monstrous foe than either could have expected.

Wiseman handles the action and suspense very well – it’s always clear what’s happening even as things are moving fast. I doubt we’ll see many more battle scenes simply due to the budget and schedule involved in producing an hour-long network show, but the smaller attacks and fights have a more vital impact anyway. The nighttime scenes in town and out in the woods create a terrific spooky mood that fits well with a show featuring the Headless Horseman.

The opening hour also has a deft touch with Ichabod’s reactions to waking up more than two hundred years in the future, as well as with people’s reactions to him. Almost everyone’s instant reaction is, reasonably, that this guy needs some serious help. What I found refreshing was that they don’t overplay their hand – the characters behave more or less as you’d expect them to in the real world in that he’s nothing more than a typical whack job in their eyes, someone who will get carted off and they’ll move on to the next thing.

Mison plays Ichabod Crane not as the scared, loveable goof from the Disney cartoon or the Tim Burton/Johnny Depp film, but as a much more traditional, broad-shouldered hero. This could have had me checking out of the show almost before it began if not for the streak of humor that runs through the pilot, most of it involving Ichabod’s reactions to everyday life in 2013. There’s just enough to keep the proceedings from being too self-serious without overwhelming the tone and losing suspense. It’s a tricky balance that the show is able to maintain in the pilot and hopefully that can continue as the series moves on.

The most vital part of keeping a steady tone is the leads, and Beharie and Mison prove to be up to the task. They have good chemistry from their first scene together, as Ichabod asks Abbie many of the questions you’d think an 18th-century white man would want to ask a 21st-century female African-American cop. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see this get glossed over but the writers use it as an opportunity for the characters to get more familiar with each other, and the show is much stronger for it. As their interests turn to the mysteries in and around Sleepy Hollow, their unexpected partnership feels natural rather than a forced requirement of the plot.

The Verdict

The tight focus of the pilot does mean that the show’s world is a bit narrow for now but I imagine that it will start expanding in the upcoming episodes, and there are hints that this is all just a prelude for much bigger things to come. Can Sleepy Hollow live up to Buffy, the granddaddy (or grandmomma) of this genre? Time will tell, but for now I’m just happy to see it off to a good start with a lively, fun first hour.